You may already, of course – know how many people are visiting your WordPress blog or website. But just in case…

It’s not wise to fret over erratic stats – we’ve all done it – enjoyed a day or several of good visitor numbers to then see a slump and start to wonder about our strategies… Instead it makes sense to consider that there may be factors affecting how busy your blog is, or isn’t. On one blog with which I’m involved it can depend on the weather; when it’s horrid outside, our stats are higher – it’s a quite a social blog site so can be welcome on a cold, stormy day. With Blogmistress we blog less at the weekends, so of course the number of visitors dips for a couple of days – I prefer to see the steady upward trend on the weekly view (and thank you, by the way!).

So, which stats will suit you.

To be honest, I think for most people the WordPress.com stats plugin is more than adequate. You’ll need the API code that you used to configure your Akismet spam filter and enter that same code to configure the WordPress.com stats. Then these will show up on your Dashboard (you can choose different settings – mouse over the top of the box to see the configure link).

We have one client who has always enjoyed Statcounter and was not keen to lose it when we moved his online rug shop to WordPress – so for him we installed the Statcounter plugin – and he continues to monitor what’s going on with his shop. I can understand wanting to maintain the familiar, especially when getting used to such a different system as WordPress can be to a static website. Statcounter is so easy to work with and was a standard for all websites we worked with.

Now if you want to really get stuck in, there is a plug-in for the real time web analytics of Clicky – this is for those of you who really want to analyse, set goals and campaigns, and even watch live activity with the upgrade. One to consider if this can be useful for you.

And then of course there are the Google Analytics plugins – many available and you need to settle on the one that best suits you. We’ve used Google Analyticator often; that does what we want.

Have a look at the available stats plugins yourself if the above don’t meet your needs – just search for statistics or analytics in Plugins, Add New and away you go.

Have fun, but don’t get too hung up over what’s going on, or spend longer than you need to on analysis. As ever, if you’re unsure what will work best for you, give us a shout…